Divine intervention: Google’s Nexus 7 is a fantastic $200 tablet

Like Microsoft, Google shows its own partners how one builds a tablet.

Camera and speaker

The stereo speakers on the Nexus 7 are covered by a recessed metal grill and point backward out of the device, meaning you'll get the best volume if you can back it up against some kind of flat surface. The speakers can get decently loud, and there's little distortion at the highest volumes. The quality is not perfect, but it's more than serviceable. Because the speakers are seated right next to one another, the stereo effect doesn't really come into play.

The Nexus 7 has only one camera, a front facing one at 1.2 megapixels. That's one more camera than the Kindle Fire has. I made some video Skype calls on both the Nexus 7 and iPad 2 to see how the cameras compared, and was disappointed to find that the Nexus 7's camera is pretty terrible.

How I look viewed by an iPad 2, broadcast to the Nexus 7

How I look on the Nexus 7's camera, broadcast to an iPad 2

Now, the iPad 2 front-facing camera is no prize, being of VGA resolution (0.3 megapixels). But holding it next to the Nexus 7 put the Nexus 7's camera to shame. Of course, there are other factors at play here: the quality of the connection, as well as internal hardware (but I will note that my FiOS connection is generous in size, and was only in idle use by one of my own computers and the two tablets at the time).

We may not be able to place the fault entirely on the camera assembly itself, but whatever was going on, it was not working very well. The photo above does not show it, but the boundaries of my face were in constant motion, as if I were being rotoscoped for a-ha's music video for "Take On Me," "Take On Me: Revenge of the Jilted Pencil Sketch Girlfriend."

We would have liked to test the camera beyond the scope of video chat, but the Nexus 7 has no pre-installed camera application. We found no recourse in the Google Play store—apparently, every third-party camera app requires devices to have a rear camera for installation. Unless you are an avid fan of Tumblr's Gratuitous-Picture-Of-Yourself Wednesdays (possibly NSFW), you won't be using the camera much in the conventional sense anyway. This cut our testing a bit short.

A photo taken with a Camera Launcher app made specifically for the Nexus 7. Not as bas as we thought, but what we'd expect from your average front-facing camera.

Update: Some good soul has made a Camera Launcher for the Nexus 7 and put it up in the Google Play Store. We're relieved to find that much of the camera's terribleness is the result of the video chat/Skype environment. On its own, the camera is merely your average, barely passable 1.2-megapixel camera, but outside video chatting it can at least make out freckles. The photo above was taken using the linked app.

Screen

The 7-inch screen is a 1280x800 IPS display, a type that is notable for its wide viewing angles. The Nexus 7's screen has a small but noticeable drop in brightness beyond about a 30 degree turn from head-on viewing. The screen is very evenly lit however, so audiences off to either side won't be at a great disadvantage.

The calibration of colors in the first icons you see on the Nexus 7 make it seem a bit undersaturated. But when we compared a wide variety of colors on other screens, we found that the Nexus 7's screen is actually a bit more saturated than usual. Purples and reds in particular are a tiny bit more vibrant, even to the point of inaccuracy.

In comparison to the iPad 2's screen, whites on the Nexus 7 are on the warm side even at full brightness, though the tinge isn't noticeable when not being held up next to another screen (Apple's iOS device screens do tend to be cooler in temperature). This is a nice change from some other large-screened Android devices, which are often either too warm or very harsh at the brightest settings. At all brightness levels, a black screen is distinguishable from the bezel, but even at 100 percent the black is still quite saturated.

In terms of detail, we're very impressed with the Nexus 7. Text looks very crisp, so the screen is great for reading and browsing. At 216 pixels per inch, it's no The New iPad™, but the density is close to the recently released retina MacBook Pro.

Reading Speakeasy on the Nexus 7.

The Kindle Fire, left, next to the Nexus 7.

The Nexus 7, left, next to an iPad 2.

While jumping between the Google Books and Kindle apps on the Nexus 7, we noticed that the smallest text in Kindle books is still quite large, while Google Books' text settings let the letters get near-microscopic. This is the tailor-made vs. general-purpose Android app divide rearing its ugly head—Google's version is optimized for the 7-inch screen, while the Kindle app's text is size-limited for the average phone screen.

Though this issue is minor (I prefer small text so I can turn the page less frequently), it does throw a tiny wrench into the "anything the Kindle Fire does, the Nexus 7 does better" argument. The Kindle Fire can't scale the text in its own Books app down as far as Google Books on the Nexus, but it does at least get smaller than the Nexus 7's Kindle app. We still prefer Amazon's selection for the Kindle app to Google's for Google Books, which trumps text size for our choice of reading app. Overall, it's just a minor inconvenience.

The Kindle Fire's smallest text size, left, next to the Nexus 7's smallest text size in the Kindle app

Enlarge/ We would have kept shrinking Google Books' text, but were worried it might disappear altogether.

A few days after the Nexus 7 hit developers' hands, a number of outlets reported that the tablet has problems with ghosting. Bringing up an image and letting it set on the screen for a couple of minutes would leave an impression of the image on the screen for up to a few minutes after the user has navigated away. We were able to recreate the problem, and found high-contrast images were particularly susceptible to imprinting ghosts on the screen.

However, the more we tried to recreate it, the faster the effect seemed to fade after we navigated away from the ghosted image. Eventually it was fading in a matter of seconds. The problem seems to be related to whether the screen is warmed up or not—if the tablet hasn't been recently used, an idle image will remain ghosted on the display for at least a couple of minutes, even as users continually change what the screen is showing. But once it's been on for a while—even if the image is left up for up to ten minutes—the ghost fades in a couple of seconds. There definitely is a problem, but it doesn't strike us as serious. That's as long as it doesn't, for instance, get worse as the tablet gets older.